On the same day two Republican senators introduced a bill authorizing construction of the Keystone XL oil-pipeline extension, the White House said President Obama would veto such a bill if it reached his desk.
“If this bill passes this Congress, the president wouldn’t sign it,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday.
Republicans took over control of the Senate as the 114th Congress was sworn in Tuesday. The GOP, and some Democrats, have supported the pipeline project for much of the past six years that it’s been in limbo, and the party wasted no time in sponsoring a bill to pressure the Obama administration to approve it: Sens. Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, and John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota, introduced the Senate bill, and a committee hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
The House is expected to begin deliberations on its own Keystone bill on Friday.
The last time the House passed an authorization, in November, it was blocked from proceeding by Senate Democrats. But with fewer numbers, the measure has a greater chance of passing this time.
However, the Senate needs 67 votes — two-thirds — to override a presidential veto. As BusinessWeek reported, Hoeven says he has 63 votes in favor of approval, four shy of a veto-proof majority.
Reaction to the White House announcement ran the gamut. House Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement:
On a bipartisan basis, the American people overwhelmingly support building the Keystone XL pipeline. After years of manufacturing every possible excuse, today President Obama was finally straight with them about where he truly stands. His answer is no to more American infrastructure, no to more American energy, and no to more American jobs.
By contrast, environmental activist Bill McKibben, writing in The Guardian, praised the effort that led to the veto threat, considering the pipeline once was considered a shoo-in for approval.
Keystone’s not dead yet – feckless Democrats in the Congress could make some kind of deal later this month or later this year, and the president could still yield down the road to the endlessly corrupt State Department bureaucracy that continues to push the pipeline – but it’s pretty amazing to see what happens when people organize.
The State Department has concluded that the 1,179-mile pipeline extension, which would carry oil-sands crude from western Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, wouldn’t significantly add to carbon emissions, but the project would create only 35 permanent U.S. jobs.
Regardless of what happens between Congress and Obama, the final decision on Keystone rests with the State Department, which reports to the president. State has responsibility because the pipeline, to be built by TransCanada Corp., would cross the Canada-U.S. border.
The Post added:
“I think the president has been pretty clear that he does not think that circumventing a well-established process for evaluating these projects is … the right thing for Congress to do,” Earnest said.
Obama rejected a Canadian firm’s application to build the pipeline in 2012.
At a year-end news conference in December, Obama sought to downplay the benefits of the pipeline. He said the benefits for U.S. citizens and workers from the pipeline would be “nominal.”
“I think that there’s been this tendency to really hype this thing as some magic formula to what ails the U.S. economy,” Obama said.
Woolsey on fuel choice: ‘Let everybody play’
/in National Security, What's The Buzz staff /by Fuel Freedom StaffR. James Woolsey, the former director of Central Intelligence and a current member of the Fuel Freedom board of advisors, went on the Jacki Daily show recently and had some interesting observations about the global sell-off in the oil market.
He said the price drop has been particularly hard on oil-exporting nations that need a high price to balance their budgets and meet generous public benefits. “Russia really needs oil up around $120 a barrel in order for its society to function,” he said.
He said nations like Russia should diversify their economies so they aren’t as reliant on oil prices for a thriving economy. “Russians don’t make anything. When was the last time you were in a store and you bought something that says ‘Made in Russia’? I guarantee you it doesn’t exist.”
Despite low prices, many experts predict that the global demand for oil will resume its upward trajectory, making fuel diversification essential, Woolsey said.
“Let the alcohol, the methanol producers particularly, and the gasoline producers and the natural gas producers, biodiesel producers … let everybody play.”
Woolsey, who served as CIA director under President Clinton, also is a member of the U.S. Energy Security Council. You can read this story quoting him about the vulnerability of the U.S. power grid in Forbes.
Oil closes down again, lands just above $50 mark
/in Economy, What's The Buzz staff /by Fuel Freedom StaffWhatever the floor is for oil, $50 doesn’t seem to be it.
Brent crude closed just a few barrel-drops within that threshold Friday, down 85 cents to $50.11. U.S. crude fell 43 cents to $48.36. The marks are the lowest for crude since April 2009, and represented the seventh straight week of losses.
However, prices recovered from even steeper losses during the day after Baker Hughes, the U.S. oilfield-services company, announced that the number of rigs drilling for oil domestically had fallen by 61 this week, the most during a week since 1991.
Read more in Reuters.
That contraction in supply has many observers believing that prices will find the bottom soon. Former Shell Oil President John Hofmeister, one of the experts quoted in PUMP the Movie, notes that the surplus of oil we keep hearing about only amounts to roughly 1 percent of global consumption, which is about 90 million barrels a day (The U.S. uses about 18 mbd). He thinks the current slide is an “anomaly,” and that prices will begin climbing again in the spring.
Here’s what he said on Bloomberg:
Tariq Zahir, managing member at Tyche Capital Advisors in Laurel Hollow in New York, told Reuters:
Author: Dieting is a terrible metaphor for reducing emissions
/in What's The Buzz, World staff /by Fuel Freedom StaffAhead of the U.N. climate conference in Paris later this year, there will be a lot of talk about how nations should apportion the burden of reducing carbon emissions. The richer, more industrialized nations have a lot of ideas about what poorer, still-developing nations should do to grow their economies without polluting the atmosphere too much.
Invariably, we might hear the term “carbon diet” come up, with its emphasis on personal sacrifice and willpower.
It’s a counterproductive metaphor, writes Lisa Margonelli, author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank.
In a post for Slate, as part of its “Future Tense” initiative, Margonelli writes that the “dieting” analogy is unfair to those developing countries, particularly when the richer ones are dictating the terms:
She goes on to argue that people in developing countries deserve the chance at economic prosperity, so rich nations should promote innovations to serve the surging energy needs in a cleaner way.
For example:
The main reason the “diet” metaphor fails is that it suggests that the world’s problems can be solved by individual willpower.
On top of all that, most diets don’t work in the long term anyway. Which some people, sadly, are about to find out, a few weeks into their well-intentioned New Year’s resolutions.
(Photo: Yao ethnic minority women cook dinner on a smoke-spewing stove in Longji, China, in 2010. Credit: CHEN WS, for Shutterstock.com)
PUMP coming to iTunes on Tuesday, Jan. 13
After a successful limited theatrical release this fall, PUMP will be available Jan. 13, 2015 to a wider audience.
Oil prices have dropped nearly 10 percent in two days
/in Economy, What's The Buzz staff /by Fuel Freedom StaffOil analysts must be asking, Where’s the bottom of the oil-price plunge?
Crude dropped again Tuesday, as Brent was off $2.01, to $51.10 a barrel. In the first two trading sessions of the week, it’s down $5.32, or almost 10 percent.
More from Reuters.
U.S. crude closed down $2.11, or 4.2 percent, to $47.93.
By comparison, Brent was at $115 and U.S. crude at $107 last June.
Phillip Streible, a senior market strategist at RJO Futures in Chicago, told Reuters that “$46 to $45 is quite likely. … People, I think, are further understanding that the U.S. is becoming a powerhouse in creating crude oil and that’s not going to change anytime soon.”
But Saudi Arabia also shows no sign of reducing production quotas, an effort some OPEC members want to prop up prices. Forbes’ Nathan Vardi quoted a Saudi expert named F. Gregory Gause, a professor at Texas A&M University, who said:
CNN Money has a story about the thousands of workers supporting North Dakota’s oil boom who’ve been laid off in recent weeks, as drillers delay expansion because the cost of extracting oil from shale-rock formations is too steep compared with the going rate of crude.
Obama, Congress draw battle lines on Keystone XL
/in Environment, What's The Buzz staff /by Fuel Freedom StaffOn the same day two Republican senators introduced a bill authorizing construction of the Keystone XL oil-pipeline extension, the White House said President Obama would veto such a bill if it reached his desk.
“If this bill passes this Congress, the president wouldn’t sign it,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday.
Republicans took over control of the Senate as the 114th Congress was sworn in Tuesday. The GOP, and some Democrats, have supported the pipeline project for much of the past six years that it’s been in limbo, and the party wasted no time in sponsoring a bill to pressure the Obama administration to approve it: Sens. Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, and John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota, introduced the Senate bill, and a committee hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
The House is expected to begin deliberations on its own Keystone bill on Friday.
The last time the House passed an authorization, in November, it was blocked from proceeding by Senate Democrats. But with fewer numbers, the measure has a greater chance of passing this time.
However, the Senate needs 67 votes — two-thirds — to override a presidential veto. As BusinessWeek reported, Hoeven says he has 63 votes in favor of approval, four shy of a veto-proof majority.
Reaction to the White House announcement ran the gamut. House Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement:
By contrast, environmental activist Bill McKibben, writing in The Guardian, praised the effort that led to the veto threat, considering the pipeline once was considered a shoo-in for approval.
The State Department has concluded that the 1,179-mile pipeline extension, which would carry oil-sands crude from western Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, wouldn’t significantly add to carbon emissions, but the project would create only 35 permanent U.S. jobs.
Regardless of what happens between Congress and Obama, the final decision on Keystone rests with the State Department, which reports to the president. State has responsibility because the pipeline, to be built by TransCanada Corp., would cross the Canada-U.S. border.
The Post added:
Despite cheap gas, EV sales were strong in 2014
/in What's The Buzz, World staff /by Fuel Freedom StaffOne narrative for 2014 is that cheap gasoline reduced the incentive for energy-efficient vehicles.
Tell that to all the people who bought electric cars during the calendar year.
With sales data still coming in, it appears certain that U.S. sales of EVs, including both all-electric and plug-in hybrids, surpassed 100,000 units.
That marks the third straight year of sales increases, since the electric vehicles we know today first went on sale in December 2010, according to Green Car Reports. The growth rate won’t come close to 2013, however, when 97,000 EVs were sold, nearly doubling the 2012 total of 53,000.
Nissan is emerging as the sales champion for the year, having moved 30,200 all-electric Leafs, a new U.S. record for an EV. That’s up nearly 34 percent over 2013, when 22,610 Nissan Leafs were sold.
Compare that figure to the Chevy Volt, of which 18,805 were sold — down 19 percent from the previous year, when 23,094 were sold.
According to the Auto Blog, Volt sales really tailed off in December, with just 1,490 units, a 38 percent falloff from the same month in 2013. Nissan sold 3,102 units for the month, up 23 percent from December 2013. The federal government’s $7,500 sweetener might have played a role, as new-car buyers sought to grab that tax savings before the calendar turned.
More Auto Blog:
One theory for the Volt slowdown is that potential buyers are waiting for the redesigned 2016 model. Although the car won’t be officially unveiled until the Detroit Auto Show next week, Chevrolet opened the kimono to allow journalists a peek Sunday night at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Check out stories here, here and here.
What about sales of the Tesla Model S, you ask? The company doesn’t post monthly sales reports, so we’ll have to wait until later in the winter for its annual report. But Inside EVs mentions both Nissan and Tesla “hitting it out of the park” in December.
Inside EVs also has a breakdown of how other anticipated models sold during the year. For instance, Cadillac moved 1,310 units of its plug-in ELR. And BMW moved 6,092 units of the i3, “not bad considering it was only available for 7 full months in the US.”
Also:
Anchorage had zero days below zero in 2014, a first
/in Environment, What's The Buzz staff /by Fuel Freedom StaffClimate experts are worried about a strange trend in the largest U.S. state: During all of 2014, the city of Anchorage, Alaska, did not see a day when the temperature fell below zero degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the first time in recorded history that’s happened.
As The Washington Post notes, the last time the mercury fell into negative digits was Dec. 26, 2013. Since then, the low has been above zero every day except one, Feb. 11, 2014, when it was exactly zero.
The Los Angeles Times says that in 2012, Anchorage had 32 days when the low temperature was below zero. In 2013 there were 14 such days.
Seven other cities in Alaska had record-warm years as well.
That doesn’t mean it was hot, per se. The average temperature in Anchorage during 2014 was 40.6 degrees, which to Southern Californians would feel like the next Ice Age. But that threshold was far above last year’s average temperature of 37 degrees.
The Times reported:
Brent crude off 48 percent for the year, worst drubbing since ’08
/in Economy, What's The Buzz staff /by Fuel Freedom StaffHey, did you hear oil prices fell in 2014?
Now that the year in oil trading is officially over, traders are counting the damage, and it’s like monitoring the progress of a boulder rolling down a mountain:
Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell another 57 cents Wednesday to close the calendar at $57.33 a barrel. Brent, as well as gasoline futures, fell 48 percent during the course of the year, making them the worst-performing commodities among the 22 markets tracked by the Bloomberg Commodity Index.
U.S. oil futures were off 85 cents Wednesday, to $53.27, and were down 46 percent for the year.
Read more in The Wall Street Journal.
The report said the oil, gasoline and diesel markets posted their worst annual losses since 2008, the year markets plunged because of the financial crisis.
Oil, gasoline and diesel markets all posted their largest annual losses since the global recession in 2008.
U.S. allows export of some oil, loosening four-decade ban
/in Economy, What's The Buzz staff /by Fuel Freedom StaffThe U.S. Department of Commerce has relaxed, somewhat, the nation’s four-decade-long ban on oil exports, put in place after the 1973 oil crisis that caused widespread shortages around the United States.
The Obama administration’s move will allow the sale of up to 1 million barrels a day of ultra-light crude. The decision likely will please U.S. drillers and many politicians who have said the U.S. export ban is a relic of an outdated policy.
Reuters reported specifics: